UK: GOP obstructionism a key to their method

PJ: Even before President Obama was sworn in as the President of the United States, republicans began calling for his failure. From radio shock-jock Rush Limbaugh to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, GOP leaders joined with their ranks to do everything in their power to block every initiative that the new President would soon put forward. Talking to some conservative American friends of mine at the time, I was startled to hear their calls for his ouster even before anything had taken place. He was called a 'socialist', a 'communist', un-American, not a Christian (as if that should matter in a country that once prided itself on its seperation of Church and State) and foreign born before the ink was even dry. Never in my life had I witnessed such unbridled hatred and uncompromising spirit in a country that once prided itself of its ability to pull together for the common good of the country. Never before had I heard calls for a country's failure just to satisfy political desires. I was confused about why so many wanted to see their country and their fellow citizens fail just because they disagreed with certain policies, even though many of those very policies were the exact policies proposed by their own party earlier. That unyielding skewed dogma has persisted and has become more pervasive at the expense of the American people, the country's economic wellbeing and America's standing internationally. For a self-styled "Christian" nation and for a party that hangs its hat on its religious beliefs, today's GOP has allowed itself to be viewed by outsiders as the most hateful, divisive and dishonest political party since....

The Economist

Lexington
Are the Republicans mad?
They are radical, not unhinged, and there is method in the apparent madness

WHAT happens to a two-party political system when one party goes mad? That is the question posed in a powerful and angry new book by two scholars at two respected think-tanks, Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution and Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute. The book’s cheery title is “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks” (Basic Books), and its argument is encapsulated in its subtitle: “How the American constitutional system collided with the new politics of extremism”.

The think-tankers’ thesis is that America’s political parties have become as vehemently adversarial as the parties in a parliamentary system. But whereas a parliamentary system allows the majority to rule while the minority bides its time, America’s separation of powers seldom gives one party the power to rule unconstrained. So the emergence of parliamentary-style parties in America is a formula for “wilful obstruction” and gridlock.

For the rest of the article:
http://www.economist.com/node/21553449